


the highway signs say we're close

by aurilly



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-18
Updated: 2014-08-18
Packaged: 2018-02-13 07:34:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2142549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dr. Whale can't explain why, but he has a hard time staying away from the mysterious weirdo who lives above the hat shop in his neighborhood.</p><p>(AKA, instead of going to Storybrooke with everyone else, the two people who were outside the Enchanted Forest when the curse struck are sent to Boston.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	the highway signs say we're close

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meddlesomewiz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meddlesomewiz/gifts).



Writing prescriptions, checking in on patients, signing health insurance forms—today was like any other day for Dr. Whale, one of the ER surgeons at Massachusetts General Hospital. If anyone asked him, he wouldn’t have been able to say how long he’d been working there, but he must have been brand new, because while everyone seemed to accept his presence, no one seemed to know him. 

But hospitals were the same everywhere, and Victor, when he wanted to, could be charming. He had no fear that he’d soon find his feet in this new job, or that he’d soon find colleagues whose post-work drinking club he could join.

After his shift, he happened to catch a story on the eleven o’clock local news before crashing. A little boy in Maine had found a newborn on the side of a highway and had carried her to a town for help. Neither of the children had any papers or way to identify them. 

“Who leaves a baby on the side of the road?” he said the next day by the water cooler to nurses who shook their heads and tsk-tsked in agreement.

The day went by quickly, and Victor soon forgot all about it, as one does about local news stories.

*

Victor lived on the top floor of an old townhouse in Beacon Hill, within walking distance of the hospital. His grandmother—rest her soul—had left it to him in her will. She’d been a German lady, and had never lost the flavor of the old country. But Victor wasn’t around enough to care that he lived in an anachronistic Victorian mansion. Plus, the place had proven to be kind of a panty dropper. Especially when you were _a doctor_.

*

The seasons passed and new buildings went up, but every day felt exactly the same. Every day, he woke up early and took on the hardest, most hopeless of cases. The lives he tried hardest to save were almost always the ones he lost.

No one blamed him; no one else could have done any better. Miracles didn’t exist.

That wasn’t a good enough answer for him.

*

A vintage, specialty and custom hat shop—tiny and eclectic and definitely in what should have been a residential-only zoning area—was on Victor’s walk home from the hospital. The window displayed top hats and bowler hats and elaborate costume hats made out of rich fabrics and leather trimming.

Victor had never seen the shop open, but he chalked that up to his odd hours. One day, he told himself, one day he’d remember to stop by during business hours and see what was going on in there. He didn’t need a hat—especially not one of the baroque models on display, but something about the shop called to him, seemed cozier and more welcoming than anything else in Boston.

*

Victor staggered down the street in the middle of the night, flaunting the open container laws by clutching a bottle of Veuve. He’d just left the hospital’s New Year’s party, disappointingly alone. His date had gone home with _a lawyer_ , leaving Victor to drink entirely too much. He had somehow lost his overcoat, and had nothing protecting him from the Boston winter wind except his white cotton lab coat. For safekeeping, his stethoscope hung around his neck, the cold metal bits hitting him as he walked.

As he stumbled his way down the familiar block, he noticed a light on over the hat shop. He’d been living here for years—at least five, maybe—but he’d never before stopped to look at what was above it. The building that housed the hat shop was pretty swank. If his townhouse and this townhouse had decided to get into a pretentious rumble, Victor wasn’t sure which one would come out on top.

He thought he saw a shadow behind the partially lifted curtain as he looked up, but he couldn’t be sure.

And by the time his head hit the pillow and he passed out, the moment was forgotten.

Happy New Year, 1990.

*

A week or so later, as Victor was heading home, he passed by the ambulance crews standing around talking among themselves. George, one of the drivers, was a friend of his, so he stopped to say hi.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“There’s a call nearby, just over on Brimmer Street, but something keeps going wrong. We sent one ambulance to get the guy, but the gurney broke as soon as we tried to get it out of the front door with him on it. We sent a second one, and the medics got in, but the doctor broke his leg going down the stoop, so we were forced to leave the guy in the house again. We sent someone on foot, but he had a stroke while ringing the doorbell. He ended up needing the ambulance to get back and into the ER."

"Oh, I treated him this afternoon," Victor said. 

"We’ve racked up three new patients trying to get this one guy out of his house. We’re trying to figure out what to do next.”

“How’s he doing? Can’t be too bad, given how long this is taking.”

“The doctors who have remained conscious enough to report back haven’t found anything wrong with him. But he keeps calling. Keeps saying to send new doctors. He also keeps complaining that we keep sending the ‘wrong’ doctors, whatever that means.”

“Sounds more like a wacko than a medical emergency,” Victor remarked.

“I know, but we’ve gotta keep trying. Get someone to finish the paperwork and close this case.”

“Brimmer Street, you said?” Victor asked. “That’s right by me. If you give me a ride, I can check him out and then head home.”

Soon, Victor was sitting in the back of the ambulance, his legs swinging off the sides of the gurney, and holding on for dear life as the vehicle made hairpin turns down the narrow Beacon Hill streets.

Brimmer Street was only a couple of blocks long, but Victor didn’t expect the ambulance to stop in front of the hat shop. It was closed, as always, but the door to the upper floors had been left ajar, presumably by the last team attempting to remove the resident.

“Here?” he asked. “This is where the patient lives?”

“Yeah. What, do you know this guy?”

“No, just always admired the hat shop. Like I said, it’s on my walk home.”

Victor announced his name upon entering the house, but he didn’t have far to walk to find the patient. Sitting in the high-ceilinged parlour, which was decked out even more stuffily than his own, was a man of about his age. He wore dark, oddly cut pants, expensive-looking boots, an elaborate velvet vest, poofy sleeves, and what looked like a cravat.

At least, Victor thought that’s what a man scarf like that was called. 

The patient was mid-gesture, ready to dismiss him, as he had apparently dismissed all the other people who had come to help him earlier in the day. But as soon as he saw Victor’s face, his hand froze, and the rest of him sprang into action. He bounded across the room—more nimbly than someone who’d been calling 911 for an ambulance all day should have been able to—and pulled Victor into the tightest hug he had ever received.

“Victor, finally, I’ve been waiting for them to send you, I knew they had to eventually. I didn’t know you were here, even though it’s been years, and then I saw you wearing that lab coat and it wasn’t Halloween, and there’s the hospital nearby, so of course you had to be a doctor, of course, of course, just like I have a hat shop. So I started calling and calling, and I figured they’d have to send you at some point, I still probably can’t leave but at least you’re here, we’re here together, though I don’t know why,” he rambled, talking a mile a minute, as though he hadn’t spoken in years and needed to get it all out at once. “God, I’m so sorry, I should have come for you that last time, but I got too scared, I was always a coward, but I should never have left you like that. I should never have gone off with the Queen, I should never, I should never…”

Victor disentangled himself and took a few steps back. Eventually, the patient realized that he was murmuring his nonsensical endearments into empty air, and the words slowed to a stop.

“How do you know my name is Victor?”

George ran in behind him with the rest of the equipment. “What’s the assessment, Dr. Whale?” he asked.

The patient looked between them. “Dr. Whale?”

“Yeah. I’m Dr. Whale. The hospital tells me you’ve been calling all day, but you seem fine. I just wanted to make sure you were okay before we close the—”

Victor explained the situation about the ambulances and the severity of prank calling 911 when there was no emergency. The man listened quietly, but his face, which had become so intensely—almost beautifully—animated when Victor had first entered the room, fell. Little by little, all of the energy and joy that had momentarily suffused it died out. By the end of Victor’s spiel, the patient (Victor checked the records George handed him and saw that it his name was Anthony Miller) had collapsed back into the ridiculously overlarge armchair he’d originally been reclining in.

“You don’t remember me,” he said, even though that had nothing to do with what Victor had just spent the last ten minutes explaining.

“Should I?” Victor meant the question genuinely. This man, so clearly driven to the edge of madness by too long spent in this musty house, thought he knew him. And something about him made Victor almost wish he could say the same. “Do you know me from somewhere?”

“From infinite somewheres, and from the places between. From your father’s summer house to…”

“You know my father?” Victor tried to place this guy in a circle of people he only hazily remembered. The faces became blurrier the harder he tried to pinpoint anything. Perhaps they’d played together as children, at boring lawn parties at the summerhouse in Nantucket, or at stultifying Christmas parties along the Main Line. Maybe their grandmothers had known one another and that’s how they’d both ended up living in these Beacon Hill Victorian sepulchers.

“I met him once. Don’t you remember? I showed up, but it wasn’t a good time. He was throwing a party for your brother, who’d just won his first promotion in the army, and you didn’t have a date, you never had a date, not until you met me, and so I offered—”

“I don’t have a brother. I’ve never had a brother.” He’d also never needed a guy to go with him as a date to anything, but the brother part seemed more pressing at the moment.

George, who had been listening to this increasingly unhinged conversation quite patiently, finally coughed and clasped Victor’s shoulder. “What do you think, Vic?” he asked softly. “Do we take him back to the hospital? Do we close the case?”

“You can’t take me out,” the patient yelled suddenly. “I won’t let you get hurt trying. You have to remember, Victor. It’s me, Jefferson. I know your paper says my name is Anthony, but it’s Jefferson. You have to help me get it to work, you’re the only one who can possibly—”

The guy was insane, that much was clear. He’d clearly been watching all the passersby from his mansion and had glommed onto Victor for some reason. 

The odd part was all the injured doctors who had come before him; George would have mentioned if there had been any sort of foul play, but it all seemed to be a big coincidence.

“What exactly did you call 911 for?” Victor asked slowly. “What’s the medical issue here?”

“No medical issue. Just wanted to see you. Just needed a way to get you in here even though I can’t get out. I’ve tried. I’ve tried so many times and I’ve only hurt myself, worse than anyone today was hurt, but it doesn’t matter, it never matters because it’s always better the next day, like nothing ever happened.”

“I think we should close this case,” Victor said slowly, backing away even though something inside him desperately wanted to stay, to worm his way back into the overly intimate hug he’d extricated himself from. The air felt colder now, after having been held that tightly. For all that he went on a lot of dates, dropped a lot of panties in his expensive apartment, no one had held him like that. Perhaps his mother once had, but he couldn’t remember it.

“We’re going to go now,” George said. 

The man, who insisted his name was Jefferson—Jefferson, Jefferson, was that a first name or a last name?—followed them to the front door, not begging but still babbling.

“I’m not mad, I swear to you I’m not. It’s gotten to you, too, only worse. I don’t know why or how, but you know me, you’ve got to remember.”

“I’ll come check on you tomorrow. I promise,” Victor said reassuringly, not really meaning it. “We’re going to close this case, but I’ll come check on you.”

“Okay. Tomorrow. Come back tomorrow and I’ll make you remember.”

“Sure, pal. Tomorrow.”

As they left, George shot him a look. “What the hell are you doing, promising that lunatic you’ll be back?”

Victor shrugged. “I don’t know. It seemed like the right thing to say. Anyway, you know I’m scheduled to go to that conference this weekend anyway.”

*

When he returned home a few days later, the little tape on Victor’s answering machine was full. He replayed it over a glass of whiskey. Half of them were from the hospital about the nutjob on Brimmer Street, and the other half were _from_ the nutjob, who had apparently found his number in the phone book.

“I know you think I’m mad, but that’s the point. I’ve read the book. Have you read the book? You probably haven’t, but you think you have. I’ve read _your_ book, and they got everything wrong, even more than mine,” the inexplicably soothing voice nattered. “If you’ll give me a chance, I can explain it all to you. I can tell you where that watch is from. I’m sure you have it, somewhere. The beautiful pocket watch. I can tell you why your cuts heal by the next day. Do they? Do they heal the same way mine do? Like they never happened? Do your patients always die? If the same power that sent me here has also trapped you in the same terrible joke, then I’m guessing they do. I can tell you why you haven’t aged in five years and why you don’t talk to anyone you knew before then. Why the harder you try to remember things, the further they slip away from you. Aren’t you curious?”

Victor listened to this, and messages just like it, over and over again, rewinding the tape until he’d almost broken it.

How did this stranger know all of these things about him? How did he know about his patients, about the watch, about so many little things that no one, not even the most assiduous stalker, could possibly have pieced together? There were too many details from too many areas of life. Too many questions sparked by nightmares Victor had never told anyone about.

*

The door swung open while Victor’s hand was still reaching for the doorknocker.

Jefferson made a grand gesture out of inviting him inside. “I knew you’d be back.”

“Just wanted to check on you so you don’t start prank calling the hospital again. The next time you pull that shit, it’ll be the cops who come, not the ambulance.”

“I’m fine, now that you’re here.”

Victor took a seat, knowing he should be afraid, but feeling nothing but an odd and hazy sort of comfort, despite being in the home of a psycho who clearly harbored some sort of obsession with him.

“How do you know all that stuff about me?” Victor asked. 

“Would you like some coffee while I tell you? They all say I like tea, but I don’t, not really. My daughter—her name’s Grace—really likes tea, but we were too poor to have it. I was poor after I stopped seeing you, you probably don’t know that, never knew that. We had to pretend. I wanted her to meet you, I wanted it so badly, but I couldn’t travel again, I couldn’t let anything happen to you or her, and so you never did meet her, and now I’ve lost you both.”

Victor asked himself for the millionth time what he was doing here, how such a bad idea had made its way past all of his rational defenses. 

However, instead of leaving, he simply said, “I’d love some coffee.”

*

“Frankenstein? You’re telling me you think I’m Victor Frankenstein?”

“I don’t think. I know.”

Victor couldn’t help but feel disappointed. He’d thought about Jefferson all through his conference in San Francisco, had come home to those messages and spent a week deliberating whether or not to follow his curiosity…

And all he’d gotten was an insult.

“Do I look like a monster to you?”

“Pop culture has misinformed people. Too few have actually read the book. Frankenstein was the creator, not the monster.”

“Right, of course.” Victor rolled his eyes. “And you’re, what? With the tea and the hats and the crazy, I’m guessing you think you’re the Mad Hatter? How do those two things even go together? Did Mary Shelley fall down a rabbit hole?”

“My name is Jefferson.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

“I wasn’t mad until I came here, to a head filled with two lives, trapped in a house and a world that isn’t my own, with the only person I’ve ever… with _you_ living just down the street, but no idea who I am. This is my punishment. This is payment for all the mistakes I’ve made, all the things I’ve stolen.”

The desperation in Jefferson’s gaze made Victor forget to breathe, much less to ask any logical follow-up questions. It didn’t make any sense for him to entertain the kinds of thoughts that currently distracted him, but that gaze inexplicably got Victor sweaty in his scrubs. And it sounded like… it sounded like what Jefferson was saying about _them_ was that…

He needed to stop working so hard and go on more dates. 

He stood up. “I shouldn’t have come.”

Jefferson didn’t follow him out this time. “You’ll be back. We’re here, in this world, but we don’t belong. Just as you can’t injure yourself, you can’t age. You won’t change. You’ve been here for five years. In five more, at the latest, people will start noticing that you haven’t changed a bit. You’ll need to get a new job, new friends. You’ll start noticing yourself, you’ll believe me…”

Victor walked out, letting the door click shut behind him. He left more to run from the unfathomable desire to hold Jefferson’s hand than from the insane ramblings.

He went immediately to a bar and picked up the first slutty grad student he could find. She was small, with long dark hair and pouty red lips. Pretty as a picture and totally his type, and as different from the cravat-wearing lunatic as you could get. He let her talk about Byzantine Art or whatever it was she studied, and as a reward, she let him do her on his living room rug, in front of the fire.

He thought, bizarrely, of Jefferson, the entire time.

About a week later, on the next night that he wasn’t too bone tired to think, he went back to the bar and picked up another girl, this time a law student over at Harvard. He went back to her place. She was cute, and funny, and didn’t seem to be looking for anything but a good time, just the way Victor liked. 

But when even she failed to distract him from the gnawing want and curiosity that burned him, he tried another girl. 

And another.

Nothing worked.

A year of working through most of Boston’s brunette grad school population later, he gave up. He found himself drunk and back on Brimmer Street.

“I don’t remember,” he said, swaying on the way to the living room, with Jefferson’s arm wrapped tightly around him. “I don’t remember you.”

“I know. Come on, I’ll get you some water.”

“The Frankenstein thing is stupid, but there has to be something. Is it that I remind you of someone? Look like someone you once knew?” Victor pressed. He was a doctor, a scientist; there had to be some explanation for why Jefferson had chosen _him_ to look at like that, why Victor couldn’t stay away.

Jefferson took a little too long to answer. “Yes, yes I guess you could say you remind me of someone I used to know. But you aren’t him. It’s only fair. I told you—told _him_ that I would be back, for one more adventure, to take him and his brother with me, to start over, together, but I… You’re not him, not anymore.”

He looked so dejected that for a drunken fleeting moment, Victor wished he could remember, even if it meant that he would be just as insane as Jefferson.

*

The next morning, Victor woke up in a bed that wasn’t his. This was hardly a rare occurrence, but the deep velvet curtains and eerie statues of rabbits and mice strewn around the ornate bedroom threw him. With his head splitting and his vision hazy, he looked around for the staircase and followed the smell of food and coffee to the kitchen. Jefferson was fully dressed, which meant they hadn’t…

“How are you feeling?” Jefferson asked. “I made you your favorite.”

Victor held onto the door frame for balance and peered at the stove. “My favorite? I don’t even know what that is. How could it be my favorite?”

“Weisswurst and sweet mustard and pumpernickel bread. You told me your mother made it for you every morning, made it for you personally, even though the servants could have done it just as easily.”

“We didn’t have servants. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Victor was sober now—painfully sober—and Jefferson was still crazy, but Victor wanted all the same. He didn’t know why, but the sad frown Jefferson gave him broke his heart; he wanted nothing more than to kiss it away, even though it was a terrible idea, even though he didn’t even _like_ men—not that there was anything wrong with that—even though he shouldn’t take advantage of someone who needed serious psychiatric help. 

He squashed the impulse, had a fleeting moment of wondering if he should eat food prepared for him by psycho stalkers… but then he remembered that he was the one who had come here last night, and that it was hard for someone who never left the house to count as a stalker.

Victor had never tasted this weird sausage-but after the first bite, it immediately became his favorite food. It was so delicious and he felt so grateful for the discovery that he forgot himself by the end of the meal, and moved to kiss Jefferson with mustard still smeared on his chin.

Kissing a man was scratchier than he had expected or was used to, yet not at all foreign. His hands seemed to know exactly where to go, and his lips seemed to immediately find all the places Jefferson seemed to like best.

But maybe it wasn’t kissing a guy that was so surprisingly familiar. Maybe it was just Jefferson.

That must have been the hangover talking, because that made no sense.

“I can’t,” Jefferson panted, breaking the kiss. “I can’t take advantage like this.”

“I’m not drunk anymore. And I think I’m more the one taking advantage of _you_.”

“You’re still not yourself.”

“I am myself. I’m just not the person you want me to be. But you know, I’ve been told I’m pretty awesome. Good-looking, too. And a doctor. You could do worse. Give me a chance. You might find I’m even better than your other Victor.”

“Oh god,” Jefferson said, as though seeing him for the first time. “The curse made you an _asshole_.”

“Is that a deal breaker?”

*

It turned out not to be a deal breaker, but Jefferson refused to kiss him again. He said he just wanted to be friends.

That was rich, given that Jefferson was the one who’d started it. His insistence about their previous dealings sounded a hell of a lot more romantic than platonic.

However, it was probably for the best, especially when Victor still couldn’t figure out what it was that kept drawing him back here, instead of urging Jefferson to get help. He wondered how and when this had become normal. How he had come to think nothing of spending his days off with a man who persisted in talking about Wonderland and Rumpelstiltskin and magic… _magic_. Ugh. How he had come to care for someone who made no sense at all, yet who seemed to make more sense than any of the sane people he spent all day with.

At first, he tried to use their friendship to get Jefferson out of the house. However, the mishaps that occurred every time he tried to leave struck with too much regularity to simply be coincidences. Victor didn’t believe in magic, but _something_ was definitely keeping Jefferson here. Eventually, he stopped trying. He did manage to get him to open the shop from time to time, to take customers and interact with people within the boundaries that seemed allotted to him. He started to get better, less frantic.

“You’re not like him,” Jefferson said one night as he held Victor’s hand and moved their joined fingers over the keys of the piano. 

They didn’t kiss, but Jefferson gave a hell of a lot of mixed signals. He was also one hell of a close talker.

“Your accent is different. You’re more sarcastic. Funnier. Victor was always so serious, so earnest.”

“What are you saying?” Victor asked slowly.

Jefferson reassured him, reading the worry in the lines on Victor’s forehead. “I’m saying I like you. I like you just as much as I lo… as much as I cared about the other Victor.”

Victor had never done beyond the requisite psychology course; this wasn’t a field he knew much about. But he’d never before encountered a disorder that told the patient other people were schizophrenic, too. In every other way, though, Jefferson was perfectly functional. 

Every time Victor tried to shake himself out of this, back to reality and responsible behavior, Jefferson would hold his hand and he’d forget what he’d just been thinking about. Jefferson’s hand meant adventure. Jefferson’s hand made Victor feel awake, and for a doctor who’d been sleep deprived since college, that was hard to run away from.

*

Just as Jefferson predicted, people did begin to notice.

“You don’t take good enough care of yourself to look like that,” the nurses said. “How do you do it? What moisturizer do you use?”

“You should have gone into dermatology,” the doctors said. “Or acting. With genes like that.”

“Guess I’m just lucky,” Victor joked, trying to shrug it off even though a voice in the back of his head told him something was terribly wrong.

He refused to believe that he was Victor Frankenstein, walloped with amnesia, magically transported to a world without magic and unable to age until the curse that had brought him here was lifted. No, he simply had really good genes, like everybody said.

But it wasn’t just his appearance that remained frozen; it was everything. All the friends who had started at the hospital with him had moved on to other jobs. They’d gotten married and had kids. They’d learned and grown and matured beyond his company. Victor felt stagnant.

People told him he had potential, was a great doctor. He should apply to another hospital, do a fellowship. People gave him all sorts of advice to help him shake up his life, but every time he tried, something went awry. He lost the paperwork, or he found some fine print that disqualified him, or he…

Nothing changed.

Meeting Jefferson was the only memorable thing that had happened to him in longer than he could remember. He was also the only other person who had stayed the same with him. He wondered if this was why they worked so well together. With Jefferson, everything was a fantasy, and yet the fantasy felt more real than the rest of Victor’s unchangingly humdrum reality.

*

Victor couldn’t help but notice the smashed glass of the hat shop as he made his way home one night. He couldn’t help but notice the shadow that crept from side to side.

He didn’t know what he expected to find when he went inside, brandishing his stethoscope like a weapon, but he definitely didn’t expect a teenage girl. 

He caught her by the back of her shirt and shoved her against the wall.

“What the hell are you doing?”

She crossed her arms and set her mouth in a thin line. 

“You’re too young for this. Did your parents put you up to this?” he asked.

She snorted.

“Not sure how to interpret that,” he said.

“I don’t have any parents.”

“Why are you robbing this store?”

She shrugged, which must have been difficult to do while hanging from someone’s arm. “I liked the hats. I… I can’t explain.”

Victor could understand that. 

A door in the back of the shop opened, and Jefferson stepped into the room. 

“This girl was trying to rob you. Do you want me to call the cops?” Victor asked him.

But Jefferson wasn’t looking at him. Instead, his gaze focused on the hat in the girl’s hands. The hat she’d been trying to steal. It was an amazing hat—huge and black and beautiful—the one Victor had always been most drawn towards. 

It must have been a trick of the light, or a gust of wind blowing into the store through the broken window, but the hat almost looked like it was shaking.

“I’m going to ask Victor to put you down, but I’m going to need you to promise not to run. Can you do that?” Jefferson asked.

“Don’t be an idiot,” Victor said. “She’s obviously going to run.”

But Jefferson was still staring at the hat and at the way the wind was making it shake, even though Victor could feel no breeze.

“What’s in it for me?” the girl asked.

“Food. Money. Whatever you want. Just… just keep doing what you’re doing.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“That’s only what you think.”

“What’s his deal?” she asked Victor.

“No idea,” was the honest reply.

“You two are a couple of weirdos, but okay. I’ll stay. As long as there’s no funny business. I want five hundred dollars. No questions asked. And I want both of you at least five feet away from me at all times.”

“Deal,” Jefferson said absently. “Victor, will you go upstairs and bring my wallet? You know where I keep it.”

“Are you sure? I still think you should call—”

“Victor, just this once, please indulge me.”

As he climbed the stairs leading to the house, Victor muttered to himself that all he ever did was indulge him. How else would you describe having spent years in a pseudo-platonic relationship with a lunatic who had only recently started seeing Victor as a real person and not a consolation clone? 

By the time he got back with the wallet, Jefferson was standing over the girl, exhorting her to ‘make it work’, ordering her to spin it, to feel it, to breathe into it.

“What the hell?” Victor asked.

“She can do it. She can help us.”

“Is he always like this?” the girl asked.

“Basically.” Victor looked at her, at her old and dirty clothes, and for the first time felt concern for her, as well as for Jefferson. “Hey, were you serious about not having any parents? Don’t you have anywhere to go?”

“My parents left me on the side of the highway when I was only one day old.”

Victor remembered this. It was as though this was the first thing he had ever known, had ever had cause to remember.

“And a little boy found you, right?”

“How do you know this?” Jefferson asked, diverted from his focus on the hat.

“I saw it on the news, maybe fifteen years ago. Kind of around the day I started at the hospital. Maybe. No, that doesn’t make any sense. It had to have been when I was a kid, if it was fifteen years ago, and if she’s this big now.” Victor felt confused.

“Fifteen years ago,” Jefferson murmured. “What’s your name?”

“Emma.”

“Emma what?”

“Like I’m gonna tell you. Do you have my cash, or what?”

“Jefferson,” Victor asked. “What do you want me to—”

“The money’s yours, but I want something in return. I want a lock of your hair. Better yet, I want all of it.”

“You want my hair? Of all the creepy—”

“I’ll make it two thousand if you let me cut it off.”

She thought, and finally nodded. Jefferson pulled some scissors from a drawer behind the register. Emma stared at Victor—clearly the grown-up in the room—while Jefferson cut off her ponytail in one clean swipe. She pulled out her scrunchie and let her hair fall in a fresh bob around her ears.

“Do I even want to know what you’re going to do with it?” she asked.

“I’m going to use it to make the hat work.”

“I think it’s already set for sitting on people’s heads.”

Jefferson handed her a stack of crisp hundred-dollar bills. He smiled, his slightly uneven teeth glinting in the moonlight. Victor thought he looked beautiful, dangerous. But then again, he always thought that.

Emma took the money and ran.

“What the hell, Jefferson?” Victor yelled. “That was crazy, even for you. She’s probably going to call the cops on _you!_ ”

“She’s special. She can get it to work. This will get us home.”

*

It didn’t work, of course. Jefferson spent a week sewing the hair into the hat, but nothing happened. It didn’t travel to magical lands like he had hoped.

It did keep shaking though, harder than before. Not even Victor could ignore that. He started reading physics journals to try to explain the phenomenon, but so far had come up with nothing.

Once he had finally accepted that it was only hair and only a hat, Jefferson stopped talking about it. About all of it. He stopped talking about Wonderland and children’s books. About his daughter. He admitted that his name was Anthony Miller, originally from Manhattan.

He stopped talking about the other Victor, and finally made a move.

They spent whole nights, whole afternoons—every waking second that Victor wasn’t at work—kissing like teenagers. And more than that, too. They fit together as though they’d been doing this for years. Victor told himself that they’d been dancing around one another long enough; that was probably why it seemed so easy.

Victor was happy, of course. Happy to finally satisfy his want, happy to be spending so much time with a real person and not a lunatic. Nothing changed (nothing ever fucking changed), but as time wore on, he found that he missed the insanity. He loved Anthony Miller, but he’d loved Jefferson, too.

And he was certain that Jefferson—Anthony, whatever—still missed his imaginary little girl.

Sanity for Jefferson looked uncomfortably and depressingly like giving up.

*

One day, it was as though something reset. A private practice fell into Victor’s lap. He was surrounded by an entirely new set of colleagues, people who had never seen his face before. He could have sworn he was older than this, but his passport gave a birthdate in line with the age of his face.

He once mentioned it to Jefferson, who merely looked pained, and kissed him until he shut up.

Soon, he forgot that he had ever entertained such a silly suspicion.

*

Victor woke up one morning to the familiar smell of Eggo waffles burning downstairs in Jefferson’s toaster.

Then he stopped himself, because no. Eggo waffles were most definitely _not_ familiar. Or were they?

He stumbled downstairs, hair in disarray and thoughts even more sickeningly askew. His father and the Harvard-Yale game and Gerhardt and the construction on the Red Line and all the wonderful adventures and all the hats. Two lives’ worth of memories crashed together in his head.

He needed an Advil.

Jefferson was standing in the kitchen, looking apologetically at the waffles as though nothing had happened. But he wouldn’t have realized, Victor reasoned. Someone who had known all along wouldn’t have felt the change.

“Sorry,” Jefferson said. “And this was the end of the package. Do you want eggs? I can make eggs.”

“I want to go home,” Victor said, hoping Jefferson would understand.

He didn’t. “Oh. Okay. When are you coming back? Your shift gets off at seven today, right?”

“No. I mean, I want to go _home_. I want to see my brother. I want to meet this Grace of yours. I want—”

Jefferson’s eyes went wide. The scar around his neck throbbed, like a vein in his forehead. He bounded across the room and took Victor’s hands.

“She did it. You remember?”

“I remember you’re a dick who stood me up that day. And got stuck in Wonderland, like an idiot.” It was strange, piecing together a real memory with information Jefferson had told him here, while he’d been cursed and unable to believe it. He supposed he’d get used to this; Jefferson would show him how to handle it.

“You remember and you’re still an asshole.” Jefferson seemed delighted.

Across the room, the hat began to spin wildly.


End file.
